Join Us June 10: Housing Recovery and CDBG-DR for Helene — What You Need to Know
- sjordan95
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Visualization of one potential future development scenario for Swannanoa
On June 10, ISD and StateBook will host Stan Gimont and LC Clemons for a conversation about CDBG-DR housing recovery. Stan spent years at HUD designing and overseeing CDBG-DR from the inside and will provide an overview about its design and purpose. LC has spent the last eighteen months on the ground in Swannanoa, working with twelve locally-rooted business owners trying to rebuild and will share this experience and the implications for other small town recoveries. The purpose of this blog is to share some important background for the webinar.
Interested in attending? Register for the June 10 webinar here
The Program and the Gap
The Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery program — CDBG-DR — is the federal government's primary tool for long-term housing recovery after a major disaster. When a hurricane or other major disaster destroys a neighborhood, CDBG-DR is what's supposed to rebuild it.
North Carolina is receiving CDBG-DR funds for Hurricane Helene recovery. One of the housing programs those funds will support is the Small Multifamily Rental Program — designed to help restore rental housing in disaster-impacted communities.
The program caps at four units.
That means a duplex qualifies. A triplex qualifies. A fourplex qualifies. Anything larger — a courtyard building, a townhouse row, a mixed-use live-work block, a 10-unit building above a coffee shop — does not.
In a large city, that gap is inconvenient. In a small town like Swannanoa, it is the difference between a recovery and a slow disappearance.
From a policy perspective, there is broad bipartisan support for protecting small towns and rural communities, but for housing there does not really exist an equivalent of the Small Business Administration and the kinds of programs it provides for small businesses. What the country needs is a layered approach to housing recovery that takes into account the structural needs of small towns and neighborhoods that can't sustain "big" developments.
What Swannanoa Actually Needs
Swannanoa is an unincorporated community in Buncombe County, just east of Asheville. It sits in a river valley. On September 27, 2024, Hurricane Helene sent the Swannanoa River cresting at 35 feet — causing what geologists have called the most significant short-term geological event in the Southern Appalachians in 10,000 years. Thirty of the storm's 230 fatalities were from Swannanoa. More than 300 businesses in the surrounding area closed temporarily or permanently.
ISD Fellow LC Clemons arrived one month later and has never left.
Over the past eighteen months, LC has been working with locally-rooted, disaster-impacted business owners on various mixed-use redevelopment projects. These are not outside developers looking to move in. They are Swannanoa people — born here, built businesses here, lost everything here — trying to rebuild the downtown that was washed away.
Examples of projects that could be developed, if they could be funded include a seasonal pop-up vendor space, a community garden, six commercial spaces surrounded by rental units. For structural and other reasons, none of these projects have more than 18 units attached to them. This would truly be a mixed use re-development that would not just bring the area back better than before, it would validate the commitment of the people who hung tough through almost two years (as of this writing) waiting for housing assistance to rebuild what took them a life time to build in the first place and Helene tore down overnight.
Unfortunately, every single one of these projects fails to qualify for the Small Multifamily Rental Program — not because of how they were designed, but because of structural eligibility rules written without small-town recovery in mind.
Why the Rules Don't Fit
The eligibility barriers are specific and, taken individually, defensible. Together, they form a wall:
The program requires more than four units — which eliminates two proposed projects. It requires that the property had residential units occupied by renters at the time of the disaster — which eliminates commercial properties, even when the owners are trying to rebuild residential units on them now. It requires that the project applicant be the same person who owned the property at the time of the disaster — which eliminates locally-rooted new buyers like one family which is trying to purchase and combine destroyed properties to build something better. It requires that applicants use state-selected design, engineering, and construction teams — which eliminates projects with local architects and builders already committed.
Compounding matters, a portion of several of these properties sits in the 100-year floodplain — which creates its own regulatory tangle, even though the projects are specifically designed with flood mitigation engineering to address exactly that risk.
The result is that five projects representing 40 units of housing, 11 commercial spaces, and a dozen locally-rooted business owners cannot access the primary housing recovery program North Carolina is deploying in their community.
The Broader Problem: Small Towns and Unincorporated Areas
Swannanoa is not unique. It is representative.
The CDBG-DR program was designed primarily around urban multifamily housing markets — large rental properties, institutional owners, established development pipelines. In those contexts, a four-unit cap on small multifamily makes sense as a targeting mechanism; larger projects are where the money is needed.
But small towns and unincorporated communities are built differently. Their housing stock is dominated by exactly the building types the program doesn't fund — the fourplex-to-twenty-unit range that urbanists call the "missing middle." These are the buildings that line small-town main streets, that put apartments above shops, that create the mixed-use fabric that makes a community walkable and economically viable.
When a flood destroys that fabric, the path back runs directly through the middle of the housing spectrum that CDBG-DR can't reach.
The county will receive the CDBG-DR allocation. Counties tend to spend on what counties know how to manage — larger infrastructure projects, established development partners, programs with clear compliance pathways. The five projects LC is working on in Swannanoa are locally-rooted, creatively structured, and designed to restore the community's character, not just its unit count. There is a real risk that the money arrives in Buncombe County and flows to projects that don't look anything like what Swannanoa needs.
What a Fix Would Look Like
The solution is not to abandon CDBG-DR — it is to fix the targeting rules for small-town and rural recovery contexts. Specifically:
Raise the unit cap for communities below a certain population threshold or in unincorporated areas. Allow locally-rooted buyers to access funds as applicants even when they were not the property owners at the time of the disaster, provided they can demonstrate ties to the community and a commitment to locally-owned operation. Create a pathway for projects in the floodplain that incorporate flood mitigation engineering — the current rules effectively prohibit resilient redevelopment in the places that need it most.
Allow local design and construction teams, subject to the same oversight and compliance requirements as state-selected teams.
None of these changes require new legislation. They require HUD and state grantees to use the flexibility that CDBG-DR's design intentionally provides, and to use it in service of the communities the program exists to help.
Join us June 10
Stan Gimont will explain how CDBG-DR is designed and where the flexibility in the program actually lives. LC Clemons will walk through the Swannanoa projects — the people behind them, the eligibility barriers they face, and what it would take to get them funded.
This is a free webinar, open to anyone working on disaster housing recovery — state and local officials, chamber executives, LTRG members, nonprofit leaders, and anyone who wants to understand what the policy landscape actually looks like on the ground.
LC Clemons is an ISD Senior Fellow embedded in Swannanoa, NC since October 2024. Stephen Jordan is the Executive Director of the Institute for Sustainable Development.
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